In the late morning of November 25 1991, my mother was riding on a disused airfield in Gloucestershire when her horse slipped and fell on a strip of concrete. She was wearing a riding hat but her head took the full impact. She was admitted to intensive care in Bristol in a deep coma, and was operated on that afternoon. Her prognosis was very bleak. The neurologist operated on Mum a second and third time over the next two months. We wish he had not.

Her reawakening, four months later, was very slow: there was never a movie moment when she opened her eyes and normality returned. Mum never came back, and she never looked like herself again either. Flaps of her skull were cut away to relieve the pressure in her brain and she had a big scar running from one ear to the other over the top of her shaved head. One of her eyes was partly shut, and has never reopened. So as she awakened she stared at us – her five children and my father – from her one good eye, looking frightened, angry, alone, because she, like us, was trying to work out what had happened, who she had become.

I am the youngest of five children. Mum had my oldest sister when she was in her 20s, and me in her 40s, and what she loved was chaotic family life. She had three children, my siblings Emma, Sophy and Tom, before getting divorced and moving to Oxford. It was the late 60s, and she and her best friend, Felicity, swapped babysitting and hotpants, wore their hair long and straight and ate a lot of cheesecake. She met my father, 11 years her junior, when he was still a student. They got married before he finished his finals and then my sister Nell and I were born.

We moved to Wiltshire when I was seven. Mum had an innate ability to create a very strong home, but would never have stressed over matching sheets and pillowcases. She filled the house with messy bunches of wild flowers and a lot of people. Everyone fell for her, because she made every day into something magic without seeming to try. Of course there must have been arguments, because that is the stuffing of family life, but even in the generically stormy teenage years, I didn’t fight with her. If I am making my early life sound romantic, that is because it was. When I feel anger or despair about what has happened to her, I remember that I was very privileged to have had her as a mother for as long as I did.

I was 16 when the accident happened and in the first year of my A-levels. Nell was on her year off before university. Life changed absolutely in the space of one morning. I can’t remember much about the time immediately after the accident, about the weeks we spent beside her body in intensive care, but someone told me that shock and trauma can make you forget a lot of things. But when she did slowly wake up, she was totally changed and entirely mentally disabled.

We all talked about what would happen when she got better. Then we imagined we would be unlocked from this awful parallel world of brain-damage units and rehabilitation centres, incontinence pads and a dribbling, confused, damaged woman who in some strange, shadowy way resembled the woman she was, but in most ways did not.

Writing this, 15 years later and Mum’s condition unchanged – if anything much worse – it seems laughable, pathetically optimistic, that we estimated her full recovery might, at the very worst, take two years. Denial, I suppose, is what we were in. And survival mode, too. When you are looking at the reality of long-term, chronic brain damage, you will do anything you can to survive.

I am now 31 and I have two young children of my own. I look back on the time before her accident as an entirely different life. Part of this is the inevitable nostalgia of an adult reviewing childhood, but what happened to Mum did profoundly change my life and my sensibilities. It is not true that every cloud has a silver lining, because nothing good, nothing positive, has come from what happened to her. It is just a nightmare, for her, for us all, that goes on and on.

Five months after the initial operations, the NHS declared that Mum, doubly incontinent, confused, disfigured, deeply brain-damaged forever, could be sent home to be looked after by Nell and me. She was awake, so they saw her surgery as a success.

A year after the accident, my sister Emma took Mum to the surgeon who had operated on her, to show him the condition she had been left in. He refused to see her. If this was saving a life at any cost, then that cost was too high.

Mum came back to live at home with a nurse. We changed her nappies, and tried to pretend that life was OK, even though the house smelt of hospitals and pee and an unnamed damage that we still couldn’t really contemplate. I did my A-levels, and Nell went to university. None of us wanted to be at home, and then a sort of late teenage rebellion set in, because it was the early 1990s and the rave scene was huge. Dancing all night in a muddy field was the most effective way Nell and I found to block out the reality of the Gothic hospital that our home had become.

But after two years everyone conceded that Mum was too sick, too deranged and damaged to live at home. So my dad sold our house, bought himself a houseboat in London and spent the change on a small terraced house in Oxford, where Nell and I both had places at university. Mum, needing skilled, full-time nursing, was awarded full NHS funding, and moved into a rehabilitation centre.

Seven years ago, she moved again, to an EMI – elderly and mentally infirm – unit in Norfolk. All of us have visited her as much as we can over the past decade. After I finished university I got married very quickly and had two children, now three and six. I got divorced almost as rapidly, and now live in Oxford in the same house that my dad bought, which Mum partly owns.

Visiting Mum is difficult. She cannot speak, write or communicate. She is epileptic as a result of the accident and doubly incontinent. She is disfigured, her head swollen, and now both her eyes are half-closed. She had to have all her teeth removed last year, she dribbles a lot, her tongue lolls and she is on a largely pureed diet. When she eats, she chokes, her tongue out. She does not recognise me, except for a moaning sound of sadness that she sometimes makes when I come into her room. I find it quite hard to remember the person that she was, the sound of her voice, the things we laughed about. She used to love babies, but when I first arrived with my son, she sat on her hands and wouldn’t look at me or touch him. I don’t know who she is.

Mum would have hated the idea of what she has become and the life it has created. There is no doubt that death would have been preferable. It would have been dignified, and you couldn’t construct a more sad living present for a person than the one that Mum lives in. Eight years ago, when she was a little more mobile, she got hold of some medication and took an overdose. She went into a coma, again, and in hospital her stomach was pumped. For what? To perpetuate this living death? When she came round again, her brain damage seemed to be more profound, and she has deteriorated even more since then.

Knowing that she was getting the nursing she needed was the one consolation after her accident, but recently that has changed. Early last year, Wiltshire Primary Care Trust (PCT), part of the NHS that had granted Mum full funding 15 years ago due to the severity of her injuries, informed me that within 28 days they would cease her funding. They claimed she no longer fulfilled the Continuing Health Care criteria to qualify for funding. No social worker has been actively involved with Mum in the past decade, even through her suicide attempt, and later an allegation of abuse at the rehabilitation centre involving a police inquiry. So the first time in many years that a social worker or member of the PCT had come to see her was to assess her for the removal of her funding. When we appealed against this decision, she was visited again by a PCT nurse who didn’t meet her, as she had been rushed into hospital that night, but he looked through her notes, talked to one of her nurses and me, and then filled in a form in which he stated that her needs were no longer “intense, unpredictable or complex”, three of the key criteria to qualify her for ongoing funding. After that the PCT relinquished responsibility for her without any formal discharge of responsibility. She was just dumped, even though social services never accepted responsibility for Mum.

Events became even more critical in late November, as we were told her nursing home was closing in early December. I found another home in Wiltshire, and stopped work, spending a month on the telephone with the PCT, pleading with them to reinstate her funding, pending the result of the appeal in January 2007, so that I could move her to a new home. Their refusal was categorical and felt deeply inhumane, as within days she would be homeless. I was advised they were acting unlawfully by ceasing responsibility for her while the appeal was in process, but I was also powerless in the face of the bureaucracy of the NHS. So they were acting unlawfully, but what could I do? Call the police?

When the PCT nurse told me that he would be going on leave for a week, and with her home closing within three days, I realised I would have to take dramatic, practical action. On December 1, I left my children with a friend in Oxford, and my sister Emma and I drove Mum to the offices of the PCT in Wiltshire, where I was prepared to leave her, because I did not have an option. The sight of Mum – damaged, frightened, vulnerable – forced them to concede, and Alison Knowles, Director of Performance Improvement and Commissioning, agreed that the PCT and social services should jointly pick up her funding until the result of the appeal in January.

The appeal about Mum’s funding is next week, and fighting her case has taken over my life. I have not worked since last November. I am a single parent supporting two children, and because I live in the house partly owned by Mum, I am facing losing my home. I know that this is a familiar story to a lot of people. Care for elderly or sick relatives cripples families already buckling under the emotional consequences of that sickness. Longevity is a family trait and Mum may well live for another 25 years. I don’t know how to shoulder such long-term financial responsibility, as her fees are more than £26,000 a year.

My story is not an isolated case. This is the way the NHS works today.

Care and the NHS

The 1946 NHS Act and 1948 National Assistance Act established two parallel systems of care: the NHS, which provides care free at the point of delivery, and local authority-funded social care, which is means-tested. Successive governments have exploited this division to cut costs and reduce NHS provision, redefining health care as social care. As long-stay NHS hospitals have been closed, funding has been moved from the NHS and local authorities to for-profit corporations.

Today the NHS in England has fewer than 190,000 available beds (most for acute hospital care); in 1948 there were 450,000 (which included long-stay beds). The mainly for-profit sector, meanwhile, has been subsidised to provide in excess of 360,000 long-stay beds. Today the NHS is responsible for fully funding fewer than 21,000 people with long-term care needs – most people in long-stay beds must pay until their assets are exhausted.

The 1990 NHS and Community Care Act was designed to reduce funding and restrict eligibility for NHS-funded care further through the formal assessments of need. In 1997, the incoming Labour government established a royal commission on long-term care, but rejected the core recommendation that personal care be free. Since then, the health ombudsman, health select committee and the Law Society have published reports drawing attention to the unfairnesses and confusion in government policy and the distress caused to thousands, yet nothing has been done. Now the courts have stepped in. The judgments highlight that government policy and procedures are being applied unlawfully, and that people whose primary need is for health care should receive fully funded care.

More than 4,000 complaints have been received by the health ombudsman – complaints can only be made once all avenues have been exhausted.

Leaving a comment on another blog about home cooking and yummy recipes by someone who really enjoys cooking this morning, got me raving on about how hardly anyone bothers to cook proper food for their families anymore. I thought I would turn it into a post for my blog as it is something that makes me very cross. So here it is.

Hi – again. I’ve just woken up – late, overslept, my boy is LATE for school. And just I’ve tottered up to turn the computer on because I’m so overexcited at the huge (6000) number of my blog views yesterday thanks to alphinventions and already over 2000 today.

I still don’t quite know what this really means though, as I have a feeling all these people haven’t really actually read my blog at all. If they had, I would be amazed.

Anyway. As your blog with my comment was the first thing I came across I thought would reply to your reply to my first comment just to help wake me up. Anyway, there’s something about you blog – I don’t know quite what- that grabs my interest.

I think it must be that your approach to food. It sounds odd. Unfortunately it is odd. BUT only because the vast majority of people (particularly here in the UK) are such nerds about food and most are quite incapable of cooking anything. This is why we substitute this almost total lack of cooking with looking at other people like Jamie Oliver cooking for us on television as a substitute for actually doing it ourselves.

How pathetic is that !

It came as a shock to me to realise I could use the word odd to describe your enthusiasm for cooking good food because such enthusiasm is so unbelievably rare and that is quite ridiculous when you think about it.

We all have to eat. That means someone has to cook it. Here in the UK we are collectively all so lazy and very, very stupid, that most of us seem to buy ready made meals in supermarkets for instant microwave re-heating and trudge off to greasy take-away food places that produce the most filthy, overpriced rubbish you could imagine.

It is common to find the poorest of families describing how they NEVER cook and eat nothing but takeaways and supermarket microwave ready garbage.

So a family of four might typically spend £6 each or £24 in total for each evening meal on this sort of nasty rubbish. This adds up to £168 a week. It costs just a third of this to eat the best of home cooked food if you bother to do it yourself.

The myth of not having enough time to cook is completely exploded if you calculate the amount of time spent queuing for takeaways etc.

As the enjoyment of eating good food takes precedence over every other aspect of life ( I mean without food every animal, including us, gets hungry and loses complete interest in everything else – sex, sleep, making money, working, rocketscience and philosophy even), this widespread disinterest and contempt of cooking is a ridiculous, bizarre nonsense.

I cook proper food for me and my boy too – every day. It has never occurred to me to do otherwise. And every time I have standard takeaway rubbish (like on motorway journeys) I generally feel yucky and bilious afterwards ! Sometimes, just to emphasise the point, I throw up because what I ate was contaminated with vomit inducing bacteria from the poor hygiene; you can just imagine what goes on, can’t you ! .

In fact this reminds me of the very first time I had a McDonalds hamburger. It was twenty five years ago in London. My wife had just given birth to my second daughter in the Whittington Hospital in Highgate. I was left in sole charge of our other daughter who was just two and a half years old.

As my wife and newborn had to stay in hospital for a few days life at home was a bit chaotic. It always is when you are suddenly left alone for the first time to look after a toddler of two and a half. You can have absolutely no idea of what they can get up to and how much time they consume if it has never happened to you.

So cooking became somewhat disorganised and in our rush to get back to the hospital one day I thought, ‘sod it’ we will get a hamburger on the way. I mean, it’s a treat for a kid, right ?

That’s what I said to my little daughter, just like I had been brainwashed to do by the whole fast food industry relentlessly brainwashing the entire population from the moment we are all born and right through to the bitter end of our lives.

You probably find people on their death beds being brought takeaway meals from the likes of McDonalds as special treats by the visiting family members who can’t think of anything better !

So, we both had our first ever McDonalds hamburger on our way to visit Mum and the brand new sister in hospital !

Guess what ?

Just as we arrived and said hello to a rather exhausted looking Mum and rather yellow coloured, cross looking newborn baby, both my two and a half year old daughter and I threw up all over the place. It caused a bit of consternation, as you might imagine.

But, boy oh boy, did we both feel better afterwards- having disposed of the disgusting, poisonous and very contaminated food we had just eaten. It was a positive relief just to be hungry again instead of feeling really, really ill.

Oddly, hamburgers have not featured greatly in our lives in the twenty five years since. In fact, I don’t even have to eat a McDonalds hamburger to feel ill. Every time I see that awful McDonalds logo I feel instantly bilious as it comprehensively completely puts me off the idea of eating any food at all !

‘Nuff said. I could ramble on and on for hours about food. I used to own a restaurant once too. That was an interesting story,

Anyway, I got so carried away rambling on I thought I would turn this into a blog post for my blog.

Good on you for the cooking thing, and keep up the good work. We cooks are a dying breed and we need people like you to stop home cooking becoming completely extinct. It already nearly is in the UK, I think.

I have just heard of a story from a very reliable source. I know this story is completely true; but if I say too much about, if I give any details which can identify anyone involved, I will be sent to jail for exposing the criminal secrecy of the Family Courts.

But if ever a case needs to be exposed (and it can’t be because the State says anyone exposing it will be imprisoned) this is one terrible injustice, artificially constructed by ignorant, nasty, people.

In a nutshell, a small boy of about seven years old is taken to hospital with vaguely flue like symptoms by his Mother. He is diagnosed with Leukeamia – a form of deadly cancer.

Of course any Mother in this situation is likely to become fairly agitated. In this hospital, staff, notably one Doctor B…., reported the mother to social services simply because they found the mother difficult to deal with and took against her ‘attitude’ to their sloppiness.

Astoundingly dimwitted, ill educated and incompetent social services staff then constructed a completely imaginary case the mother was not able to properly look after her son.

The basis of this seems to be this mother’s ‘attitide’ to hospital staff and social services. So social services forced the woman to undergo a psychiatric report which said that as the mother was contemptuous of people in authority, she must have a personality disorder and this would make her unfit to look after her own child.

Now, co-incidentally, I once had a similar experience of social services threatening to take my child away from me and have it adopted ‘if I didn’t co-operate’ with them. This was said to me by the Director of Children’s Services in front of my solicitor. This is no figment of my imagination, therefore.

I too was forced to undergo a psychiatric examination where the report announced that as I was such an individualistic person with a disregard of those in authority ( presumably social services) I too had a ‘borderline personality disorder’ which might make me unreliable in looking after my own child.

I was sufficiently articulate to fight these nasty minded people at their own game in court. I won, but it was always touch and go as to whether the bastards were going to rip my child from both his parents and condemn him to a life in abusive foster homes.

He had already been placed in foster care illegally by social services – without any justification at all, and against the order of a court that the child be looked after by me – and had been thoroughly physically abused. He was beaten black and blue by the foster parents poking him with a stick. Although this happened just before his third birthday, my child still remembers it years later.

So social services recommend to the (secret) family court that this Cancer boy be looked after by his criminally inclined Father with a history of violence and abuse and with the Mother only being allowed to see her son infrequently for just over an hour under the ever watchful and controlling eye of social services in one of their bleak ‘contact centres’.

Meanwhile, the boy angrily tells social services he doesn’t want to live with his father and sadly says “where’s my Mummy …. I want to go home to my Mummy” to hospital staff who refuse to allow his Mother to see him while he is still in hospital.

We know for certain the whole case was based on fantasy, as a psychiatrist examining the mother as part of the social services fabricated case reported to the family court that, if the mother had not taken her boy to hospital to be diagnosed and treated for his deadly disease in the first place, no accusations of possible future bad parenting would ever have been brought against her as it was clear she had always previously looked after her son very well before he came to the hospital.

It was only social services fantasizing about the mother possiibly not being able to properly look after her child at some vaguely undefined point in the future that mysteriously gave rise to the evil minded family court, knowing they were completely unaccountablt to anyone owing to complete secrecy, forcing the boy to live with a father he feared and disliked.

Meanwhile, the boy pines for his Mother, and his Mother has been driven to distraction by having her son torn from the family home by small minded, ignorant State employees without the slightest justification.

A tetchy day today. The nine year old Ninja Wrecker decided to get up early. He told me later in the day it was because the motorbike the next door neighbour mistakes for his own masculinity was standing around idling with it’s throaty roar at the crack of dawn.

A common occurrence as the inadequate idiot with the bike likes the whole neighbourhood to notice how masculine he must be making such a pathetically irritating noise. Sometimes the bike is grumbling on and off at intervals all day. What a moron !

The nine year old Ninja turned the central heating on (it’s mid-summer) and the ancient piping is so noisy it hisses and grumbles loudly until you wake up in exasperation. So I did. It was really annoying as I had only gone to bed at 2.30 a.m. owing to my desperate need to blot my brain out by watching mindless television.

It’s virtually the only escape I ever get from the Ninja, watching TV in the middle of the night while the little blighter is in bed and isn’t constantly wittering at me. More effective than Prozac, my mind gradually sinks into a semi-conscious state where I am entirely unsure of what I am actually watching. It could be anything really.

Then the Postwoman knocks on the door with a recorded delivery letter. It’s always irritating to be summoned to open the front door in your dressing gown, announcing to all the neighbours how decadent you are being in your dressing gown so late in the morning with the boy lurking behind you in his pyjamas. “what an idle pair of slobs’, they will be thinking self righteously.

Then, to really irritate me, the Postwoman spent ages and ages fumbling with letters while I just stood there like an embarrassed lemon. Eventually she plucked one from a bundle and thrust it angrily into my face, holding it strangely between her thumb and forefinger at the very edge of one corner, saying sharply ‘Is this you ?’, as she wobbled it backwards and forwards, making it impossible to read.

Without my glasses I couldn’t see anything except a blur. So I reached out to take the envelope from her so I could hold it still enough to read. Then I would be able to see the address.

That’s when this politically correct twit really wound me up by snatching the envelope back from me as I tried to take it and a brief tussle ensued. Fortunately, I won the tussle and was able to read my name on the envelope. Slightly embarrassed at the fight over the envelope I muttered weakly that I was as blind as a bat and couldn’t see a thing without my glasses. – a statement of the obvious.

After I had signed for it, and she had gone, it dawned on me the reason for her possessiveness over the envelope was the indoctrination every government employee gets about dealing with any member of the public.

All public employees these days seem to be brainwashed by their masters – the Government – to become naturally aggressive and inhuman. It never used to be like that.

They are all trained to believe everyone they deal with is completely dishonest, almost certainly inclined towards criminality at every opportunity, and with latent violence lurking it must always be potentially dangerous dealing with anyone. Just like all Government emplyees are really !

I suppose that is the natural result when you have an evil, self serving, corrupt Government that sets about systematically taking away everyone’s freedom and milks them dry right left and centre with fraudulent scams to steal as much money as possible.

After all, as the Government knows it is grasping, dictatorial, controlling, and just plain dishonest in every way as it goes about blatantly stealing our freedom and our money, I suppose it must assume the rest of us are as criminally dishonest and nasty as they are.

Therefore the Postwoman is trained to assume that householders might snatch letters not belonging to them, presumably so they can disappear inside their houses to frantically rip them open in search of valuables.

A fairly crackpot assumption on the part of the Postwoman and the people who no doubt specially train Postmen and women to hang on the letters like grim death as a cunning population of householders take every opportunity of snatching them from all the Postmen.

But that’s how they behave, so they assume everyone else behaves as badly as they do. After all they are all agents of the Government, and that’s how the whole Government behaves; totally dishonestly !

This atmosphere of paranoid distrust you now find absolutely everywhere is spread throughout every part of our society as a result of the poisonous Government we have had for the last decade.

It has employed a huge army of civil service bureaucrats to carry out a manifestly crazy and dishonest campaign of systematic persecution on the entire population of the country.

It is positively Orwellian. What this Government has done to this Country is breathtakingly nasty.

Why have we allowed it to happen ? We used to pride ourselves in our civilised way of life. We were the envy of the World for our integrity and gentle ways.

Now we have seen that we too can be prey to the evils of dictatorship and corruption along the lines of Hitler, Mussolini, Mugabe etc. Blair and Brown and their cronies have just been less extreme and a little more weasily.

Social Services Abuse Children – frequently ! No, Perhaps most of the time !

A local family I have known for some time told told me an amazing story recently. It’s about the sheer nastiness of Social Services and the bureaucracy of oppression this Labour Government inflicts on us all.

The story is one of those awful tales of Social Services tearing children away from their families without the slightest moral justification whatsoever.

This family are at the bottom of the social heap. The fifty year old husband used to be in the army. Now he is a full time carer to his wife who suddenly descended without warning into mental illness – schizophrenia – a few years ago.

It could have been because of the awful traumas the family experienced. With a son and daughter with learning disability under the age of ten, the family discovered their third child, a son without any medical problems until then, acquired bone cancer and ended up having one leg amputated at the very top of the thigh.

The family remained close and supportive of each other with the husband loyally caring for a wife constantly causing problems making life really difficult for everyone with her muddled and mentally ill mind.

I have heard a mental health nurse working in the NHS say to another husband looking after a schizophrenic partner “Why bother staying with her. It’s a waste of time looking after them. It doesn’t do any good in the end and it just destroys your own life eventually, so why bother ?”

It made me really angry to hear that. It seemed typical of so many of the lazy, self centred bureaucratic employees in the NHS, only concerned with getting paid and with no intention of ever bothering to do their jobs properly. Instead, hiding their incompetent lazyness behind a blizzard of rules and bureaucratic justifications.

The daughter went to a special school for people with learning disabilities and emerged a reasonably competent young woman, perfectly able to look after herself in her small single person flat supplied to her by the local council. The learning disabilities had been quite minor really.

Then she became pregnant. So far, unremarkable. Everyone is getting on with their lives normally and nothing particularly unusual is happening .

Then, let’s call the young girl Julie, instead of her real name, in case some bureaucratic moron working for the government tries to imprison someone for talking about this matter; because it is, apparently, against the law to openly talk about these things and people are often sent to prison for doing so.

Most people won’t know about that and you don’t really hear about the people imprisoned for protesting against the appalling and vicious incompetence of Social Services and the Family Courts.

The reason being, the Government gags everyone with oppressive laws forbidding any exposure of the dreadful activities Social Services and the Family Courts get up to.

Of course these laws completely protect Social Services from being exposed for the destructive, useless, idle and incompetent idiots they often are. The law also conveniently protects the complacent and pompous little Judges sitting in the family courts, happily collecting their large pay packets, secure in the knowledge they are answerable to no one.

I once heard of a family court Judge who billowed in thoroughly late for the Friday afternoon hearing that was supposed to have started at 2 p.m. It was nearly three O’clock when she finally arrived in the court. She must have had a really good lunch.

Apologising brusquely for being late, she announced she hoped everyone in the court would get a move on and conclude the case before four p.m. as she really had to get off on the dot of four O’clock to do her weekend shopping. She couldn’t possibly stay a minute longer that four p.m., she said.

As a direct result of what she had menacing told the roomful of subservient and groveling lawyers, ritually awed by the sheer majesty of the almost unlimited power the Judge held over everyone in the court, a two year old child was deliberately and intentionally placed in great danger by Social Services.

The poor father who had brought the case to ask the court to uphold the law and return his two year old son the court had previously ordered be looked after by him because the Mother was dangerously mad with schizophrenia, was forced to agree to Social Services being given an instant care order so the case could be finished quickly. Then the fat little Judge could cheerfully go off and do her weekend shopping without a care in the World.

Never mind the child had been illegally abducted by the insane and dangerously psychotic Mother and the Judge herself had told the Social Services she was unhappy with the obvious dangers of expecting this Mother to look after the child when clearly she was seriously mentally ill.

But, no, Social Services insisted they thought it would be too ‘disruptive’ to return the child to his Father, even though everyone in the court agreed the Father was an excellent and competent parent, always having been the principal carer anyway. The Judge specifically told Social Services she was unhappy with the idea of the Mother looking after the child as she was clearly a danger and the Father wasn’t. But, no, Social Services must have their way.

So, the Judge said she would reluctantly agree to the Social Services recommendation that the child stay with the dangerous Mother on condition Social Services visited the Mother every day to make sure she was actually looking after the child and not neglecting it. The very real risk of the child’s death at the hands of a psychotic mentally ill schizophrenic was ignored.

Eventually, as it turned out, Social Services were forced to admit the Mother was dangerously psychotic and completely incapable of looking after the child, so they put the child into a foster home rather than return him to his Father.

In the foster home the child was thoroughly abused by the foster parents. When the child left the foster home he had twenty eight identical little round bruises all over his ribcage where he had been poked hard with the end of a walking stick wielded by the foster parents.

This was to keep the two year old child from coming too close to them.

They didn’t like the idea of the child approaching them to seek the affection it craved, having been arbitrarily ripped from both his Father and Mother by the wickedness of utterly incompetent Social Services people so obsessed with political correctness that they would do everything in their power to prevent a Father looking after his own child.

Social Services even went so far as to threaten the Father in that case with taking his son away and forcibly adopting him if the Father ‘didn’t cooperate’ with them, whatever that meant.

So, back to ‘Julie’s ‘ story. Twenty year old heavily pregnant ‘Julie’ sensibly applies to the Council for slightly larger accommodation – a two bedroomed flat instead of the laughingly described ‘studio flat’ she currently occupies. Actually it is just a glorified bedsitter really, but that’s the property market for you. All exaggeration and hype.

Immediately, the bureaucrats of the ever watchful Big Brother State Surveillance, Interference and Oppression Machine swing into action.

Because Julie has had to fill out endless forms describing her entire life history just to get her Council Accommodation in the first place, the nosy officials noted she once had ‘learning disabilities’.

Straightaway the busybody and prurient Council Housing Official handling an application for larger accommodation notified Social Services that a young girl in Council accommodation was about to give birth and as she was recorded as once having ‘learning disabilities’, perhaps Social Services might want to use this as an excuse to interfere in her life, possibly even destroy it.

You bet they do.

Social Services set about causing the maximum amount of destruction and heartache they can contrive. Standard procedure really. All in a day’s work. They are used to doing this sort of thing all the time.

Within a short time after the child is born, Social Services have grasped control of it through the complacent family courts, and they can now do what they want with the child.

That often means ripping the child away from the Mother and family and putting the baby up for adoption to meet the insane ‘adoption targets’ set by an Orwellian government obsessed with controlling every aspect of everybody’s life with ‘targets’.

‘Targets’ for everything. ‘Targeted Services’, meaning things like non-existent health treatment for vast swathes of the population because services are not ‘targeted’ in their direction. Rather all the money seems more ‘targeted’ in the directions of the government bureaucrat’s pockets and fat index linked pensions.

So, particularly bad luck on all of you lot who want dental treatment. Unfortunately all the NHS dental treatment seems to have been ‘targeted’ somewhere else, because you are certainly unlikely to get any of it. You will be forced to pay for your own dental treatment yourself. Just one example of the clever dexterity of our Government’s ‘targeting’ culture.

Soon the baby is placed in a foster home by Social Services, but the young Mother is still ‘allowed’ to look after her own baby as she too, is forced into the same foster home at the age of twenty years old.

Social Services are not satisfied with torturing the Mother by telling her they have decided to bring a case before the Family Court for the forcible adoption of the child.

So, for no other reason that some knowing official employed by Social Services has decided they know best and can decide on who can have the privilege of keeping the child they have given birth to and who can be arbitrarily deprived of keeping their own child, Social Services also use the Family Court to forbid the Mother and child to visit the Grandparents, or for the Grandparents to offer their daughter any help in looking after their own Grand-daughter.

Apparently all this is based on the grounds Grandmother has been mentally ill, although she is doing absolutely fine now as her husband and children are helping her so much and looking after her.

Social Services also hint darkly to the Family Court that as the Grandparents have an untidily gaudy front garden with lots of flower pots full of flowers, this somehow constitutes a serious hazard to the well being of the baby should she visit the house.

This is the sort of thing Social Services think they ought to protect the child from and even make sure it is adopted to take it away from such a dangerous environment where it might be over-exposed to the dangers of too many plant pots in the front garden. Tsk Tsk.

So the Court bans the child from visiting the Grandparents house, having given weighty consideration to the question of too many flower pots in the garden and other things of such similar great importance.

So there we have it. Another good day’s work done by Social Services. I expect they managed to keep their expenditure of public money to a modest hundred thousand pounds or so to interfere in private family life and tear a child away from it’s parents entirely unnecessarily

Never mind the hordes of dismally deprived children who really need the intervention of Social Services to prevent things like their parents starving or beating them to death. Cases like that are much too much of a bother for Social Services to deal with. There is always an excuse for not dealing with them.

Rather just let those children get on with it and suffer the most awful privations, because the laws of obsessive State secrecy will protect Social Services and the Family courts from the public ever finding out about the true extent their breathtakingly corrupt incompetences.

It’s all just a gravy train really, a nice secure position being paid for by the taxpayer, and there is no real accountability at all. ‘Who Cares. We don’t. We’re just Social Services. We couldn’t care less about anyone except ourselves thank you very much.’

My boy – the nine year old Ninja Wrecker – came home from school today and told me there is a new rule at his school that all the kids in year six are forbidden to play with any kids younger than them – that is to say all the other kids at the school in years 5,4 and 3.

My son is in year 6. All the other kids are also not allowed to play with kids in the previous year groups as them. So year 5 kids cannot play with 4 and year 4 cannot play with year 3. Is this mad, or is it just me that has gone mad suddenly ?

Can you believe it ?

Has our Government become completely insane under that idiot Gordon Brown ? Talk about being control freaks. This takes the biscuit !

It is another example of that vast army of nerdy little pea brained, narrow minded, politically correct morons that Gordon Brown spends our taxes employing to interfere in every part of our lives.

Every State employee, no matter how junior, has learned that under Gordon Brown, there is no rule of law. All the government bureaucratic minions have been made to think they can make up any rule or infringement of liberty they like as they go along.

It is a pity this useless State school doesn’t spend more time doing what it is supposed to do and give our kids a good education instead of imposing endless petty, pointless and moronic rules.

This same school wrote me a terse letter recently telling me I was obliged to ask their permission to allow my son to cycle the half a mile from our house to the school. I was told I had to fill in a form asking for permission.

Ah, yes, a form. How can modern Britain function without us all spending our entire lives filling in forms at the expense of actually doing anything useful ?

Is this an infringement of civil liberties, or is it my imagination ?

I was unaware I had to seek anyone’s permission for either my Son or I to cycle where we pleased on the public roads.

Will the school soon be issuing edicts telling me to fill in another form asking for their permission for my son to, play in the local park ?

This reminds me something worse has already happened. The school reported me to social services some time ago because I happened to tell a teacher that I allowed my son out to play by himself, that is without any adult supervision. I’d forgotten about that.

As a single parent it has become abundantly clear to me the whole idea of both parents having full time jobs and still somehow managing to bring up their children is a complete joke.

I have brought up two children who are now adults. We were a two parent family and there was always one of us at home and not working. Now I have been bringing up my nine year old boy alone as a single parent since he was three.

What a different experience.

It is a full time job; and if I was to have a nine to five job, even locally, around the corner from my house, no matter how I arranged things, it is clear my boy would suffer immense emotional neglect as well as a considerably impoverished way of life.

I am finding it seriously difficult just trying to find enough time to work at home from my computer. There just never seems to be enough time to either get on with a decent amount of work, or to spend adequate time with my boy.

How on earth does this ignorant bunch of morons who comprise our government think any single parent is going to be able to bring up children and somehow magically fit in a full time job as well ?

Of course, it is possible to have that full time job and farm out the children to some dipsy child minder. But even if the child minding situation is as brilliant as it can ever get, it will still impose enormous problems on the child and parent.

It is hardly surprising the whole country is complaining about the dysfunctional youth of today; a vast and increasing proportion of who are becoming addicted to drugs, alcohol and crime.

It is the inevitable consequence of the Government structuring an economy which forces both parents out to work, effectively ensuring virtually the entire nation simply abandons all it’s children.

The culture of fecklessness and disinterest in getting a good job and getting on in life is encouraged and nurtured by children been left with childminders for most of their childhood while their exhausted parents go out to full time jobs, only to come home to a mountain of domestic chores for which there is not enough time to deal with.

The nation’s children are simply being abandoned – left to their own devices while their parents slog it out on the treadmill of Gordon Brown’s poisonous economy.

Taxed to the hilt, working for half the year for absolutely no pay whatever to feed the insatiable coffers of Gordon Brown’s greedily officious taxman.

And where does all this money go ? Why, to an army of nasty little bureaucrats employed in ever increasing numbers by the government to interfere in every part of our lives and spy on every citizen so they can be controlled in the minutest way.

You can’t even leave your dustbin lid slightly raised without the Government spies noting it down in minute detail and prosecuting you to brand you with a ‘criminal’ record. I mean, what a surreal joke to describe someone whose dustbin lid is slightly ajar as a ‘criminal‘ ! What kind of obscene Orwellian nightmare has this Government brought to this country?

I found this quote on the Fassit website today. It may sound like strong stuff. A little exaggerated, you might think. But I can tell you it is true because I have seen it all in action and experienced it directly myself.

Social, Services and Family Law in Britain today is evil and destructive. The system is populated by perverts and wierdos as well as just plain incompetent fools – particularly within the Social Services. No wonder the youth of the country are becoming more dysfuntional on a daily basis.

Britain has become a rotten society, as the Bishop said to the press today. He is on the front pages of at least some of the newspapers.

Here is the quote.

‘We live in a country where at present a minority of gutless, ignorant and cruel individuals stand more unaccountable than ministers in our own government. An unaccountable minority making lives hell for thousands of families and their precious children each year.

An unaccountable minority who escape prosecution for their perjurous crimes committed against innocent families in unaccountable family courts wrapped in secrecy. Unaccountable legal representatives who pretend to care right at the start only to deceive and ignore nearing the end.

These are draconian laws, but made worse when twisted by local authority officials using a safety net of unaccountability.Abolish all secrecy in the Family Courts and let the daylight of open inquiry illuminate their work.” Fassit